


Home Fires Burning

by fourteenlines



Category: Farscape
Genre: Gen, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-04-04
Updated: 2003-04-04
Packaged: 2017-10-04 12:40:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourteenlines/pseuds/fourteenlines
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The real Sikozu Shanu has endured much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home Fires Burning

**Author's Note:**

> This story owes much to "Mother Tongue" by Anna S. and "Cognitive Dissonance" by cofax, for ficcish views of Sikozu. So much so that I had to go back and make sure I hadn't stolen from them. *g* Thanks to Anna for the beta (and the jealousy.) More second-person POV, but at least I resisted the urge to write in future tense. Heh.
> 
> Spoilers through La Bomba, but especially for Hot to Katrazi

You were seventeen cycles when they made her. It was unusual for anyone to be chosen so young, and you were proud. Your father was proud as well. In fact, when word spread that you had been accepted at the Scholarium, your entire village celebrated. But that was the least of the reasons for the feeling of resolve settling in your mind.

Your parents had been members of the Resistance since before you learned to speak, and the first thing you learned to say was nothing at all. Words followed fast and free after that, in first one language, the traditional tongue of the Kalish, and then in dozens of others. Hundreds of others. But not once did you say something in any language to compromise your parents' cause. Your cause.

At ten cycles, you smuggled important documents through a Scarran checkpoint, the paper sewn into the lining of your clothes. The crude method fooled the guards' scans. You had to take care not to move in a certain way, or they would hear the paper rustle.

At fourteen cycles, you devised a wickedly simple coding system and passed Scarran secrets to your headmaster, woven into the text of your term papers. Only the top essays were passed to the headmaster for review and commendation, but you never worried. The method was entirely above reproach because your term papers were always the best.

At sixteen cycles, you witnessed a Scarran guard murder your mother with a single blow to the back of her head. You did not speak for days afterward. You did not sleep for longer. You vowed you would do anything, _anything,_ to get that image of her cold, glazed eyes out of your mind. You would give your life if necessary. The nurse gave you a drug to make you sleep but it did not lessen your determination.

Your schoolwork improved, though you had not thought it possible. You hated how the sleeping drug left you swimming through a sticky sludge of thoughts, and only took it when near collapse. On days when you refused to take the drug you sat awake for arns into the night, mind in a fever, and your mother's dead eyes would not stop looking at you. You studied frantically, trying to drive her away with ever-increasing stores of knowledge. You were accepted at the Scholarium early, the third-youngest in history. It did not diminish your drive, nor did it keep your mother's memory at bay.

Things might have continued that way, were it not for Dakra. You might have gone off to the Scholarium, continued to study far into the night, turned your prodigious intellect into something useful. You might have gone on to have a brilliant career in the Scarran government, and been a boon to the Resistance. Even on your worst days, sleep-starved and half mad, you were ever cautious. You would have been a marvelous spy.

You see that now. But when Dakra, the leader of the local Resistance, approached you about the special project, you thought of all the Scarrans a girl with your face might kill. There was no way you could decline.

She would be the spy. She would have all of your knowledge, all of your capability, all of your memories and reasons for supporting the cause. And she would be stronger, harder to kill, and capable of producing a radiation deadly to Scarrans.

What was more, should she be killed, they could always produce another. Bioloids received the most dangerous assignments in the Resistance. You would be more valuable this way than any other.

You said yes almost immediately. Silently, you repeated it to yourself afterwards, in every language you knew. It took days.

But there is another side to this story, one which you did not know about until it was far too late.

A quarter-cycle before you were to enter the Scholarium, you went on a short holiday to the lake district on your home planet. Mere days later, she returned in your place. You did not wake for three weekens and when you did, you wore a different face.

Not entirely altered, of course, and you would not pass a gene scan. But you had never considered, and Dakra had never told you, that once this was done, you could no longer be Sikozu Shanu. Not when she was to enter the Scholarium. It would be far too easy to trace.

You gave up your life, literally, but never in the way you imagined.

They created a backstory for you and allowed you to choose a new name. Sikozu Shanu's sickly cousin, travelled from the outer systems to care for the family while Sikozu made a life for herself.

While she took your life. Sometimes, you hate her.

You called yourself Sebet Shanu, and it took you cycles to realize that letting you choose for yourself was Dakra's way of apologizing. It was insufficient consolation.

You came to the village for the first time under your new name on a rainy afternoon. She greeted you warmly and sat you by the fire. They did not call you sickly merely on a whim; the body modifications left you exhausted and ill.

The two of you appeared in public together a handful of times before she left. Cousins so alike, they could be sisters. A shame the one was in such poor health. She spoke of how grateful she was to you, and she sounded so sincere. You watched her from across the room and marvelled at how well she slipped in to your life. But of course, it was her life too: everything you were, she was also. You wondered if she could still see your mother's eyes. You never dared ask her.

Then the start of the term came, and she set off for the Scholarium in your place. Dakra tutored you in what she was learning, necessary if they ever needed a replacement, but that only caused you to resent the situation to a greater degree. He explained they normally waited until adulthood for these very reasons, but you were needed, _she_ was needed, right away.

Even these lessons came to an end when she finished at the Scholarium, and now you are left with nothing.

The body modifications burdened you with a slight limp, which you suspect was purposeful. What is more, Dakra no longer allows you to serve actively in the Resistance. Your precious genes are intact, and if you were captured and your DNA analyzed, she would be compromised as well. Dakra and your father still consult you from time to time, as you are by far the most knowledgeable in the village, even if you must to hide it much of the time. But they are the only ones, even in the Resistance, who know who Sebet Shanu really is.

It saddens you that it has come to this: the best and brightest Kalish are cannibalized, made redundant, stripped of all purpose in furtherance of the cause. They have put you on cooking duty in the village. If Dakra ever needs to create another Sikozu, she will know how to prepare a flavorful meal, a skill which you did not possess at seventeen cycles. Perhaps she will look on you with more sympathetic eyes.

You wonder about others in the Resistance. Jaren Kosa's half-brother who came to care for his family while Jaren entered Scarran service. Kalla Vaki's niece who came to look after their aging great-aunt while Kalla selfishly left to explore uncharted space. You cannot ask Dakra, but you wish you could. It might be more bearable if you knew others who had sacrificed themselves as well.

You do not have as much trouble sleeping any longer, though there are still nights when you sit awake for arns. You expect they eradicated the trait from her entirely, along with the other biological engineering. Father is away much of the time, and when he is home he worries that you are lonely. You suspect he knows how difficult this is for you, treated with mistrust by your own brothers and sisters, looked down upon and excluded because they do not know you are in the Resistance even deeper than they. They look down on you, not as a replacement for Sikozu, but as a replacement for your mother, never realizing you were standing near her when she died. He likely knows also how difficult it is to waste your formidable mind here on mundane matters. But if he knows, he does not speak of it.

During the dry season, you and the rest of the women cook outdoors. The weather is turning, and soon you will be back inside, bending over smoky fires which make the entire house smell of thick, tar-like pitch. If your village consisted of Collaborators, you would have plasma cooking ranges, rationed heat and food, paved roads. There is a Collaborators' village not far from home, slightly more than halfway to the city. The sight makes you bitter when you travel past, but you have never once longed for comforts bought with compromise.

It is cold, and the wind blows your hair into your face, but for now you warm yourself over the fire, and in every sharp crackle you hear the snap of your mother's neck. You have lost much, and you have endured much. A lesser person would have suffocated in this life long before now.

Late in the afternoon, as the evening meal is simmering slowly, your father approaches. His shadow falls over your work. "Sebet," he says ardently, "have you heard?" You squint up at him, brushing your hair from your face. Dakra is standing at his side, and they both look at you in such a way that you know they are speaking to you, really to you. You think of the girl who wears your face and bears your name, but would not exist had you not existed first. You know in that instant that she has finally done something to make all these sacrifices worthwhile.

\--

end


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